A study, "Legalized Abortion and Crime," reported in August 1999, by Steven Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, and John Donahue III, a Stanford University law school professor, shows that abortion means less crime. A copy of the study was provided to the Chicago Tribune. The explanatory article by its Karen Brandon was in turn published in the Monday, 9 August 1999, Detroit Free Press and may be seen there.

Various explanations have been offered. The kids would have been in for a tough life, therefore presumably more likely to commit crime. Or, the economy or the aging population explains less crime.

See an elaboration of this by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, in Freakonomics (New York: William Morrow, 2005), pp 5-6, 12-13, 118, 137-142, and 206. Note that "the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade--poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get--were often models of adversity. They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals. But because of Roe v. Wade, these children weren't being born. This powerful cause would have a drastic, distant effect: years later, just as these unborn children would have entered their criminal primes, the rate of crime began to plummet . . . the pool of potential criminals had dramatically shrunk," p 6.

However, to medical analysts who have studied both abortion and crime, such other purported "explanations" are missing the mark. Such other "explanations" reflect ignorance of the actual 90% factor in crime. They are as erroneous as would be an explanation about lung cancer rates, that ignored the 90% factor in lung cancer.

Everyone in the criminal justice (judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, police, jailers) knows the cigarettes-crime link. They see it every day. People in the system, not just doctors, have written narratives citing the fact. A prison official, Jackson, wrote a paper on the subject in 1854! The cigarettes-crime link has been repeatedly cited thereafter, including in court precedents. Then doctors began researching the subject, ascertaining why cigarettes lead to crime, and found the explanation in that era.

An example of a woman married to a smoker, who, if she'd had an abortion, would have saved 50 million lives, by preventing birth of a foreseeably aggressive and criminal-propensity child, was the mother of Adolf Hitler.

In the modern era, anti-smoking efforts have had some success. This has had a further reduction-in-crime effect.

As smoking re-increases, the crime rate will foreseeably resume climbing.

The cigarettes link to crime was brought to the attention of the Michigan House of Representatives in 1889. Iowa banned cigarettes in 1897. Tennessee banned cigarette sales in 1897. Michigan banned cigarettes in 1909.

This website, as stated above, is only an introduction to the subject, which has multitudinous ramifications. A significant amount of background data exists, which you are encouraged to read.

William J. Bennett, 20-year smoker, and Reagan's Secretary of Education, naturally refuses to admit the tobacco-crime link, hence, takes the racist line: In September 2005, on his radio show, "Morning in America," he ridiculed the medical fact " that one reason crime is down is that abortion is up."

"But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down," said Bennett, a pretended moral expert, and author of The Book of Virtues!!